When Food Isn’t Just Food-Supporting someone with an eating disorder

This is probably the one thing I have wanted to write about more than anything else, but every time I start, my overthinking brain eventually gets the better of me and I think, fuck this.

It’s about food, although the more I’ve tried to write it, the more I’ve realised how much else comes with it.

Complicated relationships with food have been somewhere in the background of my life for as long as I can remember. I just never recognised them as complicated. Food, weight and appearance were always being discussed in my family, and when you grow up around something, you tend to accept it as normal.

My mum is probably the clearest example. She’s 67 and still regularly walks into my house, stretches her arms out and asks the same question she has probably been asking for most of my life.

“Do I look fat?”

She doesn’t, although I understand now that telling her that doesn’t really answer the question she is asking. When I was younger, I couldn’t understand why we needed to keep having the conversation.

We all approached appearance quite differently in our house. My dad would happily sit eating a takeaway in a pair of long shorts with a hole in the crotch while my mum pointed out to everyone that his bollocks were on show. He appeared to have very little concern about how he looked.

My mum, on the other hand, has always been immaculately dressed, albeit with a fashion sense that has remained somewhere around a 1970s hippy festival for most of my life. My siblings were finding their own identities while I settled on Adidas tracksuit bottoms, Reebok Classics and a Berghaus fleece, which seemed to cover most eventualities.

Mum’s cupboards have looked like a feeding ground for small birds for as long as I can remember. Seeds, nuts and various other things I have absolutely no interest in putting on a plate. Going out for food with her still usually involves her ordering something incredibly sensible before slowly moving her hand towards my chips.

I’m very Joey from Friends on that particular subject. I love you, Mum, but kindly remove your hand from my plate.

For most of my life, this was just Mum being Mum. My sisters had their own versions of it. A FaceTime call could somehow become a detailed assessment of somebody’s face, neck or whichever part of themselves had been selected for criticism that day. I would laugh because I genuinely didn’t understand how somebody could spend so much time examining themselves on a tiny screen.

To be fair, I have a couple of pints and my own face looks like somebody has inflated it with a bicycle pump, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too smug.

What I didn’t appreciate was that I had grown up surrounded by conversations about food, weight and appearance without understanding much of what was underneath them. I heard the words, but I didn’t understand the language.

For me, food was remarkably uncomplicated. If I felt like I had gained a bit of weight, I would train harder for a while and maybe lay off the booze. I understood calories in roughly the same way I understood petrol: you put some in, you burn some off and ideally you don’t spend your entire life staring at the gauge.

Without realising it, I assumed everybody else’s relationship with food should operate under roughly the same rules. Just eat something. Eat a bit less. Stop worrying about it. You look fine.

They are incredibly simple answers when the person giving them has never experienced the problem they are supposedly solving.

Years later, somebody I cared about developed an eating disorder. I’m not going to tell their story because it isn’t mine to tell, but I can talk about what I began to understand while standing alongside it, including some things about myself that I would probably have preferred not to discover.

My first instinct was that I could fix it.

I have spent a large portion of my life being the fixer. At work I’ve often been the person people turn to when they’re struggling, and I’m comfortable helping, supporting and trying to find a way through something. There was a problem, somebody was having a difficult time and therefore there must be something useful I could do.

I approached this in much the same way, without appreciating how far outside my understanding I was.

At first I thought support meant encouragement or reassurance. Perhaps if I learned enough, I could find the right thing to say. I started reading about something I previously knew virtually nothing about and somehow also ended up cooking, which is generally an activity I avoid unless it involves beans on toast or throwing something into the Ninja Foodi.

My mum still takes the piss out of me for this. She said to me the other day, “Remember when we used to come round and you’d have your little pinny on making salt-and-pepper cauliflower?”

I can laugh at that now, but I recognise why having something practical to do mattered so much. Preparing food gave me a task I could complete when I couldn’t work out how to help with anything else. I could follow a recipe, put something on a plate and feel useful for a while.

Somewhere along the way, though, being supportive gradually became feeling responsible. There wasn’t a moment when I consciously decided that was my job. I started noticing things, wondering whether to mention them and worrying that saying the wrong thing might make everything worse. After a conversation about food, I could find myself going back over my choice of words, questioning whether I’d been helpful or simply added more pressure.

At the time, I thought that was simply what caring looked like. Looking back, I can see how frightened I was by being unable to make things better.

I offered reassurance, asked questions and pointed things out, approaching conversations as though there must be some combination of words that would make everything make sense. Some of those attempts were clumsy. There were things I said while trying to help that I later worried had made the situation harder.

My answer to that uncertainty was usually to try harder. Read more, understand more, be more available. Perhaps the next conversation would go differently, or somewhere on the internet there was a paragraph containing the answer I hadn’t found yet.

It’s uncomfortable admitting that because I can see the flaw in it now. I couldn’t see it nearly as clearly when I was involved. I thought caring meant finding a way to help, so being unable to help felt like something I needed to overcome through more effort.

What I struggled to accept was that caring about somebody didn’t make me qualified to treat what they were experiencing. Nor could I make their recovery happen by being sufficiently attentive. I could have a part in supporting them without having the power to make them better, but for a long time that felt frighteningly close to giving up.

The experience also changed how I heard conversations that had been happening around me my entire life.

My mum said something recently that stayed with me. She said she would love to wake up one morning and not spend the day thinking about food.

A few years ago, I would probably have made some stupid joke about thinking about food all day myself. This time I understood that she wasn’t wondering what was for tea. She was describing how tiring it was to keep having the conversation in her own head.

I thought about all the times she had stood in my house asking whether she looked fat, and how quickly I had dismissed the question because the answer seemed obvious to me. I had been answering what I could see without paying much attention to what she was telling me.

That doesn’t mean I now assume every worry about appearance is an eating disorder. It means I’m less willing to decide that something must be easy for somebody else because it happens to be easy for me.

The conversations with my siblings looked different too, as did all those occasions growing up when somebody’s body somehow became the first subject discussed when they walked through the door.

Maybe it’s a Liverpool family thing, but somebody could disappear for six months, travel around the world and return having discovered the meaning of life, and there would still be a mum, nan or auntie somewhere saying, “Haven’t you lost weight?”

We talk about people’s bodies with astonishing casualness. “You look well.” “You’ve lost loads of weight.” “Have you been dieting?” Sometimes we believe we’re paying a compliment without having the slightest idea why somebody’s appearance has changed, or how they feel about us mentioning it.

I’ve done it plenty of times. I’ve described food as good and bad and congratulated people for losing weight without knowing anything about the circumstances. I hadn’t thought particularly deeply about it because, for most of my life, I hadn’t needed to.

I’ve also started hearing the way men talk to each other differently. The number of times I’ve sat with a group of men and heard somebody called a fat bastard or a fat arse probably runs into the hundreds.

“Fucking hell, mate, you can’t half put the food away.”

Somebody laughs, takes another glug of their pint and the conversation moves on. I would once have thought nothing of it. Now I sometimes wonder whether it moves on quite as easily for the person the joke was aimed at.

Perhaps they aren’t bothered. Perhaps they’ve heard it all before and genuinely find it funny. Or perhaps laughing is easier than telling a table full of mates that they already struggle with how they look.

I don’t know, and I’m beginning to appreciate how much room there is between somebody laughing at a comment and us knowing it hasn’t hurt them.

I still take the piss and expect a reasonable amount back, but I’m more careful about making somebody’s body the joke. Knowing someone well doesn’t necessarily mean knowing how they feel about themselves.

What I’ve had to learn alongside that awareness is how to notice somebody’s struggle without making myself responsible for resolving it. My instinct is still to analyse what’s happening and work out what I should do. Sometimes speaking up matters, but I’m learning to express concern without turning a conversation into an investigation, and to ask what support would help rather than arriving with my own plan.

I can listen and encourage somebody towards people who understand far more than I do. What I can’t do is guarantee that any of it produces the outcome I want, however carefully I choose my words.

Looking back at the cooking, the reading and the conversations, I can see genuine care. I can also see how much I wanted relief from feeling helpless. Good intentions didn’t prevent my own fear from getting mixed into the support I was trying to give.

I would much rather tell you about the salt-and-pepper cauliflower and portray myself as some heroic little Jamie Oliver of emotional support. Unfortunately, that would leave out the times I was so occupied with working out what to do next that I wasn’t listening properly to the person in front of me.

That is probably part of the reason I kept abandoning this article. It’s easier to write about the importance of understanding other people than to explain how long you spent misunderstanding them.

My mum will still come round and ask whether she looks fat. I’ll still tell her no, and when we go out for food she’ll still order something sensible before helping herself to my chips. I’m unlikely to become any more generous about that.

But when she tells me she’s tired of thinking about food, I hope I’m better at hearing her. I don’t need to find a solution before she’s finished speaking. I can give her room to explain something I haven’t experienced, without assuming that my experience makes more sense than hers.

For years, my mum asked a question I thought I had already answered. I’m only just learning how much I missed while I was so certain I knew what to say.

Before you disappear...

If you enjoyed this, there’s plenty more where it came from. You can subscribe at the top of the page and get new stories straight to your inbox. No spam, just a little more Wildly Gentle.